Parenting perceptions among college students: A qualitative examination

This study assessed the knowledge and attitudes of young adults without children in regard to discipline and parenting practices. A qualitative design was utilized (n?=?26) with semistructured focus groups. Results indicated participants believed discipline is important, with spanking and loss of privileges being the most effective strategy for behavior change. The majority of participants reported plans to discipline future children the way in which they were disciplined, suggesting a high percentage intend to utilize spanking. Findings suggest that personal experiences shape parenting beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge. Results inform efforts at educating future parents on appropriate parenting practices and indicate the need for protocols for young adults to educate about practices that may diverge from their personal experiences.     

Kinship care and issues in permanency planning

Kinship caregivers are a child-care resource for families experiencing stress or temporary parenting due to illness, incarceration, or death of a parent. This article examines whether and how felt caregiver burden influences the reported propensity of caregivers to want to adopt the children in their care. Kinship caregivers who were enrolled in KinNET completed the survey (N = 102) and the data were entered anonymously into SPSS for analysis. Their mean age was 57.51 years (SD = 10.13), 95% were female (SD = .19), and two-thirds were non-white (SD = .73). Using “likelihood of adopting the child in my care,” as the outcome variable in the linear regression analysis, caregiver’s age, monthly income, and total hours employed were significant predictors. Total pressures, family service needs, and physical problems scales were not statistically significant predictors. The adjusted R square was .439 and significant (.006). Understanding the factors that are predictive of adopting children in kinship care will help programs target services more effectively. Helping kinship caregivers and the children in their care is also important in promoting their health and social well-being.     

A Land of Milk and Honey? Breastfeeding and Identity in Lesbian Families

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between breastfeeding and identity in lesbian-identified families based on a pilot study of qualitative interviews and a short survey of six lesbian families in Canada and the United States. Although breastfeeding is assumed to be “natural” and a biological function, we problematize the practice as both gendered and heteronormative. In our research we found that breastfeeding has a complex role to play within the construction of one's identity as a mother, of one's gender, and of one's sexual orientation. These women's experiences offer interesting insights into the nebulous boundaries of biology and the ways in which assumptions about what is “natural” are actually social and cultural constructions.     

The expected and unexpected media effects on youth’s (mis)perceptions of peer norms: Chinese college students’ overestimation of peer smoking prevalence

Youth’s perceptions of peer norms have profound effects on their attitudes and behaviors. Unfortunately, their perceptions of peers tend to be biased. To investigate the role of media in the formation of misperceived peer norms, the current study tested and compared two media-effect mechanisms: the direct exemplar mechanism and the indirect influence of presumed influence (IPI) mechanism. The two mechanisms were tested in a sample (n = 1746) that is representative of college students in one large university in China, based on which the actual and perceived campus smoking rates were examined. The individual-level perceived peer smoking prevalence was then analyzed in comparison with the campus-level actual smoking prevalence. The results revealed serious overestimations of peer smoking prevalence. As predicted, pro-smoking media content significantly heightened smoking prevalence estimates through both exemplar and IPI mechanisms. In contrast, anti-smoking messages did not elicit any intended effect through the IPI mechanism, but showed a boomerang effect through the exemplar mechanism. These findings suggest that both pro- and anti-smoking media content may be responsible for inflated perceptions of peer smoking among youth.     

The sociology of U.S. gun culture

Despite the fact that a robust culture centered on the legal ownership and use of guns by law‐abiding gun owners exists in the United States, there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture. Rather, the social scientific study of guns is dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence. As a corrective to this oversight, I outline what a sociology of U.S. gun culture should look like. In the first section, I give a brief history of U.S. gun culture from the founding era through the 1960s. Guns began as tools of necessity in the colonies and on the frontier, but evolved into equipment for sport hunting and shooting, as well as desired commodities for collecting. The second section examines these recreational pursuits which formed the core of U.S. gun culture for most of the 20th century. Although recreation remains an important segment, the central emphasis of U.S. gun culture has gradually shifted to armed self‐defense over the course of the past half‐century. The third section examines the rise of this culture of armed citizenship, what I call “Gun Culture 2.0,” the current iteration of the country's historic gun culture. I conclude by suggesting important avenues for future research.     

All Data are Wrong,but Some are Useful? Advocating the Need for Data Auditing

In a recent article from the Annals of Applied Statistics, Cox discussed the main phases of applied statistical research ranging from clarifying study objectives to final data analysis and interpreting results. As an incidental remark to these main phases, we advocate that beyond cleaning and preprocessing the data, it is a good practice to audit the data to determine if they can be trusted at all. A case study based on Ghanaian Official Fishery Statistics is used to illustrate this need, with Benford's law being the tool used to carrying out the data audit. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Local influence in seemingly unrelated regression model with ridge estimate

Local influence is a well-known method for identifying the influential observations in a dataset and commonly needed in a statistical analysis. In this paper, we study the local influence on the parameters of interest in the seemingly unrelated regression model with ridge estimation, when there exists collinearity among the explanatory variables. We examine two types of perturbation schemes to identify influential observations: the perturbation of variance and the perturbation of individual explanatory variables. Finally, the efficacy of our proposed method is illustrated by analyzing [13 A. Munnell, Why has productivity declined? Productivity and public investment, New Engl. Econ. Rev. (1990), pp. 3–22. [Google Scholar]] productivity dataset.     

Difference-based matrix perturbation method for semi-parametric regression with multicollinearity

This paper addresses the collinearity problems in semi-parametric linear models. Under the difference-based settings, we introduce a new diagnostic, the difference-based variance inflation factor (DVIF), for detecting the presence of multicollinearity in semi-parametric models. The DVIF is then used to device a difference-based matrix perturbation method for solving the problem. The electricities distribution data set is analyzed, and numerical evidences validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Correlated gamma frailty models for bivariate survival data

Frailty models are used in the survival analysis to account for the unobserved heterogeneity in individual risks to disease and death. To analyze the bivariate data on related survival times (e.g., matched pairs experiments, twin or family data) the shared frailty models were suggested. Shared frailty models are used despite their limitations. To overcome their disadvantages correlated frailty models may be used. In this article, we introduce the gamma correlated frailty models with two different baseline distributions namely, the generalized log logistic, and the generalized Weibull. We introduce the Bayesian estimation procedure using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique to estimate the parameters involved in these models. We present a simulation study to compare the true values of the parameters with the estimated values. Also we apply these models to a real life bivariate survival dataset related to the kidney infection data and a better model is suggested for the data.